


The Water Runs Off Your Skin (and down into the drain)

by WatchMyFavesSuffer



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Anorexia, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, Bulimia, But also Roman being a sarcastic little shit, Child Abuse, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Roman's Repeated Inability To Do Sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:01:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25544791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WatchMyFavesSuffer/pseuds/WatchMyFavesSuffer
Summary: Looking at his body in the mirror, it hits him with the finality of something inspired. “This,” he thinks. “This body has got to go.”A sort of drabble-y exploration of teenage Roman Roy developing an eating disorder. Plenty of angst, plenty of snark. Featuring Logan Roy's Stellar Parenting. Title from Regina Spektor's "Poor Little Rich Boy"
Comments: 3
Kudos: 34





	1. Fail-Schlong

It occurs to Roman, when he is 17 and in bed with a girl for the first time, that the one thing he can not bend to his will is his own body.

Okay, that’s not true, because Roman cannot bend _most_ things to his will. Almost everything, actually, seems impervious to his charms. But one day he is going to be truly, absurdly, orphan-murderingly rich, a king instead of an inbred second-born prince, and then he can buy and sell whoever and whatever he wants.

But even if he had his trust fund right now, in bed with this girl, who will also be rich one day, because everyone Roman knows is going to be rich one day, the simple fact is that no amount of money will give him the ability to cum right now.

And yeah, maybe he could pay for Viagra, to help him with the tenuous hold he currently has on his boner, or whatever grey-market snake-venom serum the truly rich use for the underperforming dicks, or maybe a really good shrink, who could help him get to the root of why he’s not turned on right now, that is if he could ask to see a shrink without giving his dad seven simultaneous heart attacks— but all this aside, if cum doesn’t wish to exit his dickhole, no amount of bribery or blackmail or Waystar Royco swag bags will make it change its mind.

So this girl, a redhead named Claire who’s grandfather invented something important and expensive, is looking up at him expectantly, and the air grows increasingly thick until Roman finally drops the stupid condom he was trying to open and hastily rolls off of her to stare up at the ceiling.

* * *

Roman had met Claire at a party during winter break. She told him she planned to study art history at Yale.

“You’re going to study art history, my name is Roman: match made in heaven.”

“And why is that?”

“The Romans were like, the fuckin’ best at art and they’re very…historical. They had the—the statues and shit.” He had a vague sense that the Romans had been good at everything and also uniformly incredibly hot.

“You know, Roman art is known for having no infancy. It didn’t develop organically, it just stole from Greek art and moved on from there.”

“What a coincidence: I also didn’t have a childhood.”

She laughed, a nice, bell-like sound with a mean edge. It made his dick hard.

“So, you go to Yale, I go… wherever I’m going, we have wild, anonymous sex at our respective campuses until one of us gets a venereal disease. And let’s be real, it’ll probably be you. But I will be gracious about your diseased genitals and marry you anyway, then we’ll have beautiful babies who grow up to look like Roman gods and they’ll do the whole thing over again when they’re our age, except with…hoverboards or something.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, huh Roy?”

* * *

And, several months of flirtatious emails (if the linguistic jizz Roman sprays all over her counts as flirting) later, she ends up skulking out of his bedroom in the Hamptons house during spring break, probably getting ready to tell all her friends from Dalton-Spence-Nightengale-Horace Mann about his fail-schlong, and Roman is left thinking about his body and its utter indifference to all the money and power he will one day inherit (and which, technically, will also belong to his body, he guesses, seeing as how he can’t seem to leave the fucking thing behind.)

And Kendall is snorting up the wealth of some Peruvian village, and Shiv is fooling around with a senator’s son, and Connor is— well, probably feverishly writing letters to Ronald Raegan with a hand down his pants, or something. So Rome stands in his en-suite, naked in front of the mirror, for God knows how long.

Roman had spent over 17 years of life on this Earth without ever really settling into his body. Like, he could never sit in a chair normally. And when he went to the beach, he couldn’t just lay there in the sunlight with his eyes closed like everyone else seemed able to do. He had to move, had to hide, had to bounce his leg up and down until he was shaking like a human vibrator. And maybe he just needed Ritalin, or maybe these things weren’t symptoms of anything at all, but it all felt like something was deeply, terribly wrong, like he was missing an ingredient or maybe like he had called in sick the day they taught everyone how to be a person.

Roman _wants_ something, and maybe that something is to be able to fuck girls like Claire and enjoy it, or maybe it’s just to feel calm for once and not like a toddler wriggling in his seat during Monsters, Inc., or maybe it’s to close his eyes and go to sleep and not wake up until he’s already an adult.

But sitting there in front of the mirror, Roman thinks that what he wants is to be really, devastatingly handsome.

The thing about being wealthy and powerful is that you don’t actually _have_ to be good-looking. And, really, a lot of rich people _seem_ attractive until you look at them closely and realize they’re kinda flabby, or plain, or just generally fucked-up looking, but their money had created this impenetrable curtain of fuckability. Roman wonders if he’s developed that curtain, if it’s something automatic or if he has to work for it, and is that what Ivy League schools are for? To give everyone a chance to perfect their air of attractiveness? Or will he magically be gifted his fuckability when he turns 18, like Harry Potter but for hot-passing people? Or was something about him so broken that even a few hundred mil in the bank couldn’t make him appealing?

Looking at his body in the mirror, it hits him with the finality of something inspired. “This,” he thinks. “This body has got to go.”

But the problem with his body isn’t just that he wishes he were thinner, or taller, though he thinks that, too. It’s that there’s nothing _special_ about it. It isn’t the body of someone who has _been through_ anything— because he hasn’t— and it isn’t the body of someone who is _going places_ — because, he guesses, he isn’t. So he resolves to stop eating _._

If he were a little bit sadder, or at least a bit more dedicated to the emo aesthetic, he would start cutting himself, in obvious, visible places, just for the scars and the perverse pleasure that would twist his lips when someone asked where the marks came from. _That_ would be beautiful. But he figures developing an eating disorder is a pretty solid choice, too. And maybe this whole line of thinking just masks what is an obvious neglected-rich-boy attention grab, which would be much more easily accomplished with drugs (except Kendall already had that covered and Roman refused to be a knockoff in his own dysfunction.) Maybe all that’s true.

Still, there’s something very stoic, very masculine, very fuckin’ James Bond about being too good, too busy, too much of a fuckin’ man for food. Starving down to nothing but muscle, his body one arrow of intention and strength (like Brad Pitt in _Fight Club,_ which was a movie Roman knows he should have thought was stupid and told Shiv he hated even though he secretly sort of liked it.) He thought his dad would vaguely approve. If Roman were nothing but the essential pieces, a lean mean fucking fighting machine, maybe his brain would follow suit, drop all the fuzz and the noise and the distractions, all the embarrassing parts of his personality.

Probably not. But maybe he’ll pass out in pre-calculus and at least get Logan to take the afternoon off to charter a helicopter to his boarding school and back.

And, while he’s looking for reasons, there was, of course, the Tennis Incident.

Back when he was a freshman, Roman quit tennis (a sport his dad personally couldn’t stand and said was for fags but which nonetheless he wanted his kids to be the best at. Except for Shiv. She rode horses, because apparently girls who play tennis “get fucking Cassius Clay arms”, which is a statement so uniquely Royesque that Roman thinks he should get it needlepointed on a pillow.)

“I always knew you were a moron, but I didn’t know you were a quitter too.” Logan mumbled at Roman, one eye on the ATN report droning from the flatscreen on the far wall. 

This song and dance was nothing knew, Roman knew he just had to wait it out and not make eye contact and sooner or later his father would dismiss him with his usual “Fuck off.”

But before he did, he muttered “You’re not exactly built like Charles Bronson, you know. I thought you would want a little exercise, so you’re not a fat fuck forever, like Sandy Furness’ boy.” (In Logan’s eyes, even if Furness was currently kicking his ass in terms of market share, he was inferior by virtue of his kids being paunchy, balding losers.)

And Roman couldn’t help himself, shot back “Because _you_ were on People’s Sexiest Oligarchs Alive list. I forgot.”

Which was when Logan threw a highball glass at him. It hit him square in the solar plexus and he hit the ground, breathless. Point made. Logan turned up the volume on the TV and Roman focused on making as little noise as possible as he dragged himself off the ground and out of the room.

They never talked about it again, because of course they didn’t, and Roman didn’t _think_ he internalized it. Like, if it had traumatized him for life, he would know right away, wouldn’t he? But he still wishes he were different. Roman is so good at being complacent that sometimes, he thinks people mistake it for confidence. Just because he had no idea how to change anything about his life, doesn’t mean he doesn’t wish he were smarter, or more focused, or five inches taller with a better jawline. And how _did_ people go about changing things about themselves anyway? Especially when their trust fund will still be 9 figures and a hell of a portfolio of stock options no matter how much of an underachieving little spazz they are?

Well, he knew how to change _one_ thing.

And what a sweet little fuck-you note to dear old Dad it would be. The next time he threw something at him it would hit nothing but a thin layer of muscle, stretched tight over bone.


	2. Batman of Anorexia

So Roman makes up his mind to be anorexic, which is a touch too edgy and maybe too Linkin Park when you put it in so many words, so he prefers to think of it like a hunger strike for some vague but profound cause. Noble and romantic, you know, and not like a cheerleader picking at her food-court French fries (Are food courts still a thing? You know, in actual America?) The whole proposition doesn’t sound so hard, considering the Roys only have family dinners on Thanksgiving, and no one really gives a shit if Roman does or does not eat so long as he stays in school and out of the tabloids. 

Roman buys a scale with body composition analysis, Bluetooth compatibility, and longitudinal BMI graphing. It feels appropriate that being rich will make him better at acquiring a mental illness. (He also buys a leatherbound notebook and a set of pens from the Muji store in London to keep track of his weight and calorie intake, but he forgets to use it pretty much every day, and he doodles in the margins too much, which ruins the clean, minimalist I’m a Perfectionist Now aesthetic that he’s going for. The prospect of Shiv stumbling on it and ratting him out is too anxiety-provoking, anyway, so he switches to a word doc hidden in a folder on his laptop.)

The thing about studiously trying to be a good anorexic (like, really, giving more attention to it than he ever has to any school-like activity) is that it gets boring. Like, how do you focus on  not doing something? And a half dozen times in the first few weeks of his get-thin-quick scheme he absentmindedly grabs some food and bites into it then goes  _fuck fuck shit gotta google the calories fuck is this something a real anorexic would eat shit_ — and that gets annoying. And having to add numbers all the time is pretty lame, if only because it reminds him that he’s never been particularly good at math, and actually he’s not doing so hot in pre-calc and should probably be focused on  those numbers rather than how many calories are in plain popcorn or rice cakes or a single grape or whatever. 

But there are benefits. Like, when you’ve been eating less than 500 calories for a few days straight and the hunger feels like something beautiful and diamond-bright and cold, and your brain is sort of fuzzy, not like being drunk but like when you’re just waking up and you’re removed from the world and still sort of half-tethered to whatever you were dreaming about. Like that. It feels like being able to breathe, finally. His thoughts don’t come quite as quickly, or knock at the walls of his mind with so much insistence. 

When spring break ends, he packs up his scale and notebook, all his gadgets, like some sort of Batman of anorexia, and gets in the town car back to boarding school. It turns out starvation is in some ways even easier at school, since he doesn’t exactly have people banging down is door to go with them to the dining hall, or out for pizza during free periods. But he is also expected to go to his classes, and stay awake and alert and like a living human being during them, which is hard to do when he’s too dizzy to stand half the time. And his Shakespeare electives don’t provide the most thrilling distraction from how hungry he is, especially not when the hunger has stopped being a pleasant fuzziness and started feeling like a feral dog gnawing on his insides. 

He drinks water. Flat, sparkling, mineral, even the pH-adjusted shit specially formulated for high-powered gym douches, which Kendall swears by and which costs $5 for one overdesigned bottle. And he drinks Diet Coke, and sugar free Red Bull (10 calories), and chews on ice. Anything to satisfy the need to put something, anything in his mouth, but not food because he is going to be a real, honest-to-God, capital-A Anorexic if it kills him. 

He keeps his scale beneath his bed and weighs himself every day, but he swears he looks the same. And he has a roommate, which means his ability to stand in front of the mirror and scrutinize his reflection for evidence of his weight loss is greatly limited. This makes him resent his roommate, Chad-Thad-Tripp-Chip, more than he already did by virtue of his face, voice, and general manner. 

One day, after giving a half-hearted look at his AP French, Roman is laying in his bed and trying, as always, to distract himself from food. It’s been so long since he’d tasted anything that wasn’t a vegetable or saturated in artificial sweetener that he’s starting to think about nacho cheese Doritos in a near-sexual way. He wonders how many calories it would be just to lick the cheese dust off one chip. He tries googling it, but apparently no one has calculated that. He needs to get his mind off of it, stat, or he might go crazy. Like cartoon-where-everyone-looks-like-a-giant-chicken-leg crazy. So, because he’s 17 and it never sounds like a  _bad_ idea, per se, he decides to jerk off. 

He’s tried internet porn before, and some of it is alright—the girls are pretty, pretty enough for him to feel like they would never talk to him in real life, which helps, and there’s a sort of intellectual curiosity satisfied by seeing a woman put her feet behind her head while she fucks a guy who’s standing up— but nothing thrums through him and rearranges his senses the way he wants it to. So he prefers to jerk off to memories. Like his seventh grade math teacher, who was Russian and mean and called him “Bagel Boy” in her slight accent, which was some sort of oblique reference to the zeros she inevitably wrote at the tops of all his tests. But he can’t quite picture her tits, or hear her vice in his ear, and the frantic movement of his fist becomes meaningless, rote, each stroke bringing him no closer to orgasm. He zips up and sighs deeply. 

Fuck. Well, might as well head down to the dining hall. 


	3. Sushi (which has super anorexic vibes)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big CW for binge/purge behaviors in this chapter!! Don't read if you're sensitive to that kind of content please.
> 
> Other than that, hope y'all enjoy. :-)

The weather is glorious, which he barely registers as he hurries across campus, but it means most people are eating outside in groups of three and four, writing spring term papers, or talking about the best places to get E when the weekend comes. The dining hall is mostly empty, and last lunch isn’t for another 45 minutes, so there’s tons of time and lots of food and suddenly the phrase “kid in a candy store” makes a whole new level of sense to Roman. Except most kids aren’t halfway to hypoglycemic shock.

Roman’s school has unfairly amazing food (Although he hears Dalton does sushi day once a week, which would be so much cooler, except Dalton has _lawyers’ kids_ who take the _subway_ , for fucks sake, and maybe it’s the low blood sugar talking, but fuck those losers) and the choices are almost dizzying.

Just grab something small, something without a lot of calories, to take the edge off the hunger. Simple.

He’s still sort of thinking of his pre-algebra teacher, Ms. Detchkov, who had a post-Soviet hardness and too much lipliner and skinny arms, and how she called him Bagel Boy, so he grabs a bagel. Then ice cream while the bagel is in the toaster, then a bottle of Diet Pepsi from the vending machine, and he’s eating the ice cream while he butters his bagel, and he opens bag of chips. He doesn’t really remember sitting down at a corner table, and drinking the soda, and taking a few lemon bars from the bakery section, and alternating bites of ice cream and buttered bagel and chips, but before he knows it the plates and cups and bowls are all but empty.

Shit.

(None of this would have happened if his school had sushi, which has super anorexic vibes, like Dalton.)

Roman really wants to just crawl back into his bed and take a shame nap before he has to go to US History (and, by the way, learning about the Gilded Age feels much different when your class is jam-packed with Vanderbilts) but he’s seen the tv movies—he knows what he has to do.

He’s not sure bulimia makes as poignant of a statement as anorexia, but it’s better than keeping it down like a normo.

No time to go back to the dorms. He hurries into the bathroom off the dining hall.

* * *

And ten or fifteen minutes later, when the job is done (and by the way, TV movies really make it seem like quickly sticking one finger down your throat does the trick, but the reality is a lot more hack-y and gag-y and multi-fingered than he had been led to believe) he feels… _good_. He feels empty again, and somehow cleaner, like going to the sauna and emerging baby pink and raw and new.

He’s comforted by the idea that he’s back on the straight-and-narrow (emphasis on narrow, amiright?), his need for food is out of his system and he’s ready to attend to the very important business of starving himself.

He makes it another two weeks a few days before the need is back, and he steals away to the dining hall ten minutes before final lunch ends and chokes down bags of chips and a cupcake while speed-walking back to his dorm to throw up. He slaps himself in the mirror, _get your shit together, Roy, you’re fine, you obviously don’t need food._ And it really does feel like that, like he’s completely transcended the need for food. Something about being Logan Roy’s son makes that feel possible. So he washes his hands and rinses his mouth out and reminds himself _you’re a fucking Roy, now go act like one._

And for days, even weeks, at a time, Roman starves, and he feels invincible and superhuman and honestly a little giddy with the headrush and the hunger. He buys a mini fridge for his room and fills it with Red Bull and diet soda and fat-free yogurt in unnatural, aspartame-y colors. He keeps packets of Crystal Light in his dresser the way his roommate stashes porno DVDs, under mounds of socks. He avoids the dining hall like the plague, as though if he ignores it, he can forget that real food exists and tastes good and isn’t full of carcinogens and artificial sweetener. His roommate, Thadwick Zippertrip or whatever, tells him _did you know Red Bull is made of cow semen? It’s true, Google that shit._ While he’s pretty sure that’s not true (and like, does Chadshire think that Red Bull factories are just happy ending massage parlors but for cows?) he hasn’t eaten anything that doesn’t leave his mouth coated in chemical aftertaste for so, _so_ long. Or, ya know, he actually _enjoys._

So the periods of time when he is “good”, when he’s absolutely crushing it at this whole anorexia bit, never last long. Sooner or later he says _fuck it, one day of eating won’t hurt_ , or else declares to himself that this little apostasy from the world of the flesh is over and was pretty stupid anyway, he should just eat normally again.

But he invariably leaves the dining hall feeling horrified and anxious, and well, he _knows_ how to fix it, so might as well _do_ it, right? And every time he ends up back in the mirror, splashing water in his face, examining his eyes for redness, and swearing that _this time you’re gonna stick it out, no more eating, you lame-ass rat fuck._

And soon, junior year is over. He squeaks by with passing grades and 3s on his AP exams. Now he’s facing a summer of either some sort of Royco internship or tagging after one of his siblings: Shiv, who was studying Shakespeare in France, or Kendall, who was shadowing their dad and panting after him like some sad little puppy dog who ejaculates spreadsheets.

The internship sounds so bored he could hang himself just thinking about it, but hanging around Waystar means Harvard MBAs tripping all over themselves to befriend him or grab him lattes in the hopes that a good word will find its way back to Logan. His last name is better than money, better than a black card, better than a 13-inch cock, so long as he stays in the financial district.

But going to Europe promises freedom from Logan, and doing experimental drugs in debauched clubs, and maybe a boat out to the UK to see his mother. On the other hand, if there’s anything France does better than hairy armpits on women and rude old people on the metro, it’s ridiculously calorically dense food. He can’t imagine a scenario that _doesn’t_ end with him binging and purging croissants and camembert all day while Shiv rehearses Hamlet. He doesn’t even speak enough French to ask a waiter to substitute Equal for sugar.

Or he could follow Kendall, sleeping in the Hamptons house or the Upper East Side apartment and smoking joints on the sailboat he got for graduation. Which sounds nice, but Kendall has sort of a silvery sheen in his eyes lately, and doesn’t sleep, which honestly bums him out. Whatever, Kendall has a serious case of Harvard Brain anyway, weed gives him the munchies.

The only way to avoid food for any significant length of time seems to be the internship. Time to call Dear Old Dad.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the long wait! it's a long chapter, though, so hopefully that makes up for it?

“Hey, Dad. It’s Roman. Roy. Your son. The short one? Anyway. I already have a fascinating calendar full of enriching and educational yet appropriately masculine activities planned for this summer. Obviously. Buuuut if you wanted me to do something at the company, that would be cool, too? Give me a call if you get this. This is Roman, by the way. Roy.” _Idiot_. He drops the phone like it’s some kind of household pest and lets out a long “Fuuuuck.” Well, at least that was over with.

The next day he gets a call. “Hey Uncle Frank!” Roman switches to his Frank impression— which includes a comical British accent, even though Frank is not British. “I’m Frank, and my wife left me because I fucked a book!”

“Pleasure to talk to you too, Roman. I hear you’re taking the internship in Films?”

“Wait—Films? I thought I’d be downtown in News. Or, y’know, Orphan Sales.”

“The car will come to take you to JFK Sunday morning. I’ll have my staff email you.”

Films. As in, _LA_. As in, running auditions for identical brunette women with flat stomachs. As in, going to the gym five times a week and eating only raw spinach isn’t edgy and disordered but pretty average. Living in LA is like Eating Disorder 401, senior year stuff. Roman is most definitely still a freshman.

Anyway, as far as the Roys were concerned, LA was still an unsettled frontier, Wild West shit. New York was just about the only civilized place in this store brand version of a country. Would people in LA even have the good sense to suck his proverbial cock in hopes of endearing themselves to Logan, or did they save that behavior for casting directors?

But the car arrives and takes him to the airport anyway, and he watches 5 hours of movies on the plane and fights the urge to order a meal, and he arrives in Los Angeles where a second driver (could have been the same driver, for all he knew, they were all sort of faceless and all dreamed, vaguely, about guillotining him) drives him to an apartment, pre-furnished and pre-stocked (minus the standard bar cart Waystar provides for its executives). First order of business: throw out every scrap of food in the place, minus the apples and oranges in the decorative bowl (Bananas, however, are a no-go. Too many calories and he’s not sure he’s macho enough to pull off putting phallic objects in his mouth). Second order of business: find some way to make this internship his bitch.

His first day, he rolls in about 20 minutes late after stopping at Starbucks (venti iced green tea, 6 packets of zero cal sweetener.) He is shadowing a “casting associate”, which means he’s sitting at a folding table somewhere in Glendale collecting headshots from hot women who smell like desperation and studio apartments. The guy he’s shadowing, Randy,had obviously been told who Roman was, because the guy keeps asking him all these questions about school and college applications and his opinions about _film_ , as if Roman had taken this stupid job because he has a deep passion for such esteemed Royco productions as _Sorority Death Squad 2_ , and not because he needed an internship that would keep his father off his back until school started again.

He spends the first half of the day with his feet kicked up on the table, trying not to look too bored as an endless procession of white girls perform the sides with Randy, who is like _way_ too close to creaming his jeans at the ability to use his NYU Tisch acting skills for 30 seconds. Between auditions, Randy asks him which actors he’d responded to.

“This one was good.” Roman says, pulling a random head shot out of the pile. “Really, uh, doing the work. Or, like, the craft. You get it. Whatever,” and turns back to filling in every _o_ on the paper in front of him.

Finally, _blessedly_ , it is his lunch break. “There’s like, _mad_ snacks in the break room. Help yourself, Rome.” Randy says, and Roman can see the nervous middle-class sweat beading on his youngish but prematurely balding forehead. _God, this guy wants approval more than_ I _do_. _Yikes._

He stops by the break room, intending to scavenge a sugar free Red Bull. (And if he doesn’t find one, he’s not really sure who he’s technically allowed to yell at until they go to 7/11 and buy him one.)

The girl who works at the front desk is talking to another casting associate, and they’re laughing. She’s not much older than him, probably a college student, with a lip ring and low-rise jeans. They’re probably talking about normo bullshit, and obviously he shouldn’t care what someone with a _lip ring_ thinks of him, but it still gives him total social blue balls to see people having a conversation that he doesn’t have the slightest clue how to break into. The only other person in the room is talking to someone on their cell phone.

After searching the fridge (there’s a few Diet Cokes but no Red Bull), he’s not really sure where to sit or what to do. Pretend to do work? Play Tetris on his phone? Hang himself?It occurs to him he hasn’t eaten since he left New York. That makes it something like 24 hours (although he’s too lightheaded to do the math of subtracting the time difference). It couldn’t hurt to eat _something_ …

Shockingly, in a move that absolutely _no one_ could have predicted, Roman ends up scarfing down a couple Yoplaits and a handful of peanut butter-filled pretzels and completely flips out. He checks his watch: he has about ten minutes until he’s back on the clock.

He half-walks, half-jogs around the office, looking for bathrooms. (They’d given him a tour earlier but he’s been thinking about where he should go to buy a scale and also trying to remember the words to the song at the end of that Pokemon movie.)

He scrambles around a corner and finds a men’s room. There are only two stalls and one is taken. _Shit._ He has seven minutes until he has to be back— he doesn’t really care about punctuality, but he doesn’t want anyone going looking for him and finding him engaged in a nom-and-vom session.

He peeks his head into the women’s room. This could end badly, especially since most people already suspect Roman is a sex pest, but it’s empty and the seconds are ticking down. Fuck it.

When it’s over, he wipes the last bits of bile off his hand with the shitty one-ply toilet paper in the stall and checks his watch. He looks up as he unlocks the door and makes eye contact with someone.

She’s got curly honey-colored hair and razor-sharp collarbones. She’s sitting on the counter by the sink, smirking at him. There’s a makeup bag on the counter next to her, forgotten. He hadn’t heard her come in over the sound of his own retching ( _note to self: keep working on throwing up quietly_.)

“Need a mint?” she asks. She’s about his age, and probably an intern, too.

“Uh, no. Just need you to move so I can wash my hands.”

“This is the girl’s room, babe.” She hops off the counter. She towers over him on long legs.

“Well, you’re like three inches taller than me, so maybe _you_ should be in the men’s room.”

“So, are you bulimic or what?” She asks, returning to her makeup bag and curling her eyelashes. She has a weird, Vogue-y face, with far-apart eyes and a sharp jaw and a big pouty mouth.

His mouth is dry as he pulls a paper towel from the dispenser. He started this whole eating disorder bit because of its fucked-up glamour, right? Why not tell her? Some random wannabe commercial model who works in _casting_ has no right to judge him anyway. And didn’t he _want_ attention? So why was it so hard to open his mouth and say "yes"?

Before he answers one way or another, she says, “Because you’re pretty skinny. Like, in a sad, Daniel Johns kind of way.” She might be making fun of him and she might be flirting. Fuck, he can feel himself getting hard.

“And you’re pretty skinny in an _I have an Adderall habit because I can’t afford coke_ kind of way.”

She laughs, tossing her head back.

“I’m Melissa, by the way.” She zips up her makeup bag and offers him her hand.

“Roman.”

“Now, are you going to answer my question, Roman?”

“I’m really more anorexic.” He mutters, feeling like a total dick, like he’s bragging.

“That’s cool. I’m like, into pro-ana I guess.”

“Cool.” Roman says, not really sure what that is. This is the weirdest exchange he's ever had in his life (and he's related to _Connor_.) 

“You probably don’t want anyone to know, huh?” she asks.

“Like, _no_. Don’t like, write it up and put it on the bulletin board in the break room or anything.”

“Well, is your little secret worth giving me a callback?”

“What?”

“You work here, right? I’m about to go in and read for some character named Jessica, and I would appreciate getting a callback.”

“Are you—you’re fucking blackmailing me!”

“That’s right babe.” She smiles, all lipgloss-slick.

 _Dear diary, today I met the girl I’m going to marry,_ he thinks. He follows her out the door.


End file.
